Before the server move, I was on a fairly small server. I wasn’t sure about the move but decided it was better to do if voluntary than wait until the end when the moved all the people who didn’t want to. There were always so few people on the planets. The most chatty was someone with a toon named Freya. I always wondered what happened to her. Her comments made it should like she was a her. I could be wrong. Some guys really get into playing female toons. At that time, if your name was already used on the server you were being moved to, you were the one forced to change yours. I was lucky and I didn’t have to.

The night I made the move, I got logged into the new server and there were sure a lot of people. I was on the pub fleet taking care of what I call house keeping. I go through all my stuff, see if I have anything new I can put on my companions, cycling through them all. Then sorting what I needed to save and what I could sell on the GTN, turning on RE to see which things I couldn’t auction that I could RE, and then finding a vendor to sell the rest of the stuff.

How I feel as I write this.

This could take a while. I suddenly got this tell asking if I wanted to join a guild. Sure! I said. It was from Doc.

I was really quiet for a month or so. I have been playing MUD’s, MOG’s and MMO’s since the early 90’s. I’ve seen good guilds and bad guilds and relaxed guilds and fanatical guilds.

I loved Proteus. It was the best guild I had ever seen and I was amazed at how many years it had existed and how many games it crossed over. I had never seen anyone accomplish such a thing before.

I alternated my time between all my toons until I slowly stopped playing the lowest level ones and focused on my pub main and imp main. Once I hit 50 on my pub toon, I pretty much focused on her (Lindrossa) after that. I would pop on and do a mission on the imp side once a week. I would pop on to a couple of my alts and do a mission or two once a week. I was trying to level a healer and a tank, even though I’m not really fond of tanking. I figured I should learn it enough for an emergency back up, just in case.

So in those days, people would see me chatting for a few weeks and then I would be on imp a few weeks and come back and see a lot of different people chatting. But there was a significant core group that was always there, always chatty, and pretty darn nice.

And once I started playing Lindrossa nearly exclusively, people started to get more familiar with me. One day, when discussing PVP and Flashpoints, it came out that I had never actually done a flashpoint. So people volunteered to do the first FP mission we get with my new healer. After that, I switched to my main and people took me through an FP on her.

Photo not up to date. Not my current gear.

I had avoided most PVP and FP because I never found them to be any fun in all the other games I ever played. Most of them were super fanatical and expected people to be totally geared the instant they hit the level they could start doing the pvp or raiding.

With SWTOR, I discovered that I really liked PVP. And with Proteus people, I found FP’s to be extremely fun. I was having a blast and I was told I was doing pretty darn good for not having run any of the FP’s we were running and being totally under geared. So they invited me along on various runs to help me start to get geared up.

I must have been doing okay because after a few weeks, I was recruited to a set raid group by a person who liked to find out about people before inviting them on a run. Mostly, has anyone run with them, what do they know of them, how do they do? My raid leader was a great person, really helpful, didn’t hold it against me that I hadn’t run a lot of the FP’s and raids before, helps me get geared up. Many people in my team were really helpful with pointing me in the right directions to find information on how to get the most out of my class when doing PVE.

We would raid twice a week and do random ones other nights. They didn’t mind that I like to do both PVE and PVP. I carried around both sets of gear so I could switch without having to find a cargo access. Sometimes, when people were doing random FP’s, they would throw me an invite. So I would sometimes still do runs with other people.

The guild meeting were surprisingly entertaining. Doc sounded like such a great guy and every meeting he talked about his ideals and purpose for Proteus. Sort of like a mission statement.

But then a few people were rubbing the wrong way, doing and saying things in general chat that were starting to give a bad impression for Proteus. Sometimes it was a bit embarrassing. And since some of them were high up in the leadership levels.

It finally came to a head and people who were not involved with the public drama but where trying to find solutions finally decided to leave. After all, allowing some of the really high up people to whatever they want that was contrary to Doc’s mission statements seemed like a sign of favoritism and selective application of some very basic and simple rules.

After this happens, Doc posted a list on the guild website that was terribly insulting and sounded like a drunk person wrote it. I even thought it was a bad prank. That he hadn’t written it but someone else did. But no, I later found out that he had even had people review it first. It was a list of people he wanted as officers and why. Not only did the letter sound drunk, was rude, but it was also insulting to half the people he said he actually wanted.

After that, I was very uncomfortable and concerned. Every day, people who were very active and were driving forces behind Proteus were leaving or being kicked. The letter caused several people who were mentioned as being wanted to leave. Like I said, it was highly insulting. Half my raid group left and some of the really active people stopped talking in guild chat. Vent got a lot quieter too. People were afraid to say anything just in case they were kicked for something they didn’t realize they said wrong.

It got to the point that every time I logged in, I pulled up the guild roster, changed it to show off-line members as well, and checked for certain people, to see if they were still there. There were no more random invites for runs and I spent most of my time doing PVP, getting more elite PVP gear, and doing some Gree missions.

Lilith and the Serpent.

And then somethings happened Monday. Someone who really was instrumental in getting raid groups going and helping me out personally was kicked. Just for being friends with someone else who was kicked. So now you had to be friends with the ‘right’ people and if you happened to be friends with anyone the powers that be want to kick then you too will be kicked.

I was upset about this but I was asked not to do anything. So I went to play on an alt that wasn’t in Proteus. One I almost never played. I saw two Proteus members get added to the guild she was in. Names I knew. Names of really active people.

I logged back into Lindrossa and checked the guild roster for certain names. Nearly every single one of them was gone. These were sudden kicks of people on Doc’s list of people he wanted to keep. Some for no reason they were ever told.

In the end, my impression is that a couple of people who were friends of the leadership, who had been on less often lately, came back to find a whole crop of really active people at the helm of Proteus. After all, Doc isn’t on much, Kitty is on more often but she isn’t on all the time either. So the people they assigned to look after things were doing so with a lot of input of the people who were really getting the guild active in end game content, raiding and having fun and keeping the game fresh, helping the lower level people, and really helping new 50’s get into the swing of ‘what to do next’. As a quiet person, who mostly observes, but would run with some of these really active people, and listen to them in vent, my impression is that these other people, who were spending more time on other servers or where otherwise occupied, suddenly came back and wanted THEIR guild back and THEIR power back and for people to look to THEM again.

Nearly all the really active people have been kicked or left before they got kicked. The people running raid groups. The people trying to get PVP groups off the ground. The people actively running datacron or pet/egg safari’s. They are all go. I log in and the chat is filled mostly with people I’ve never heard of before and don’t know anything about. I see trash talk about the people who left from people who don’t know what they are talking about. The people who left were the ones really working their asses off for Proteus. They weren’t out for power or glory or manipulating behind people’s backs. They did it for the love of the game and the love of what HAD been the best guild ever.

After finding out people were getting removed from the guild because they were friends with the wrong people, I realized that Proteus had turned into a guild I no longer wanted to be a part of anymore. There was nothing left of all the good things and everything that happened was completely contrary to all the things that Doc said at each and every guild meeting.

So Monday night I left the guild. It was sad to do so, especially such a long-lived and wide-spread guild as Proteus. It’s a phenomenon that I’ve never seen and may never see again. But it isn’t worth staying if you have to worry that you are going to get kicked because you are friends with, and still run raids with, the people who have left or were kicked.